As allegories for our present go, pairing The Underground Railroad with Black Wave was a little obvious. Just the one—a popular juggernaut about white supremacy—or the other—a drug-fueled, one-way trip to the apocalypse—sure, fine. But both together?

Day two of the ToB finds Kirstin Butler deciding between an indie hit and one of the biggest books of the year.↩︎ The Tournament of Books

Both [novels] put a lot of stock in the totemic power of dreams; both grapple with gender and power, and the limits of autonomy in “civilized” cultures. At times, for different reasons, I had to turn away from the pages. Shit gets raw.

In an interview, Gyasi said she made sure to keep each chapter around 25 or 30 pages—and that she was never really tempted to break this rule—but there’s no such economy in The Nix’s logorrheic prose, which coils and spins at least three or four distinct novels into one singular story.

Personal conflicts in the week so far at the Tournament of Books.

On Tuesday, Bim Adewunmi was forced to decide between The Underground Railroad and All the Birds in the Sky.

I loved both books so much, and in such different ways, that it felt like picking between a banana and a plantain: Both are delicious and nutritious, and both look very similar from a distance, but they are two very different beasts, and they generate very different reactions in my core. It’s been a difficult few months, sorry.

Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet is part literary novel and part psychological thriller. It’s a quiet, ominous book, confined to the mind of its heroine and full of questions about resolutely unhip matters like the meaning of existence.

The week so far in the Tournament of Books: genre debates, politics not-as-usual, and a highly personal reading of dust jackets.

One of the nice things about fiction is that it keeps us away from that particular abyss as a side effect of the search for beauty and meaning. Also, sometimes, it’s straight-up about alternate realities accessible through rifts in the space time continuum.

I had too much fun reading—OK, maybe “fun” isn’t the perfect word to describe novels about abortion and terrorism, but how else to explain the pure joy in reading, or rather the wish to distill both books down to their essences and inject them into your bloodstream so that you too could write like these two?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was the first contemporary novel I fell in love with, and it sketched out what I wanted in my fiction from that point on: international intrigue, linguistic shamanism, and Salvador Dalí in a brass diving helmet. I can only remember finding one flaw in Kavalier and Clay—and it pissed me off to no end. The back flap included the following note about our author: “He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a novelist, and their children.” I immediately wished I could unread that. Why foreclose the possibility that I was reading a gay writer describe Sam Clay’s sore fingertips in his lover’s mouth? I understand, theoretically, being in a happy marriage and wanting to celebrate that in print. But get it off my dust jacket, man!

Day three of the Rooster tests literary fiction against genre: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky.

As a college student, I studied with a teacher who wanted me to buy and to use a garden guide as part of my writing habit. The book she recommended was beautifully illustrated—a gorgeous object. I happily carried it around and turned to it in green spaces. It was the first time I had really tried to look at nature with a more attentive gaze, to name what I was seeing, and to understand my relationship to it.

Writing about a sport should never be just about a game. Sure, you need your daily recaps and breakdowns. Tell us why this trade will matter in the long run, or how a starting guard going down with an injury can actually benefit a team. But there’s always a deeper story there.

Check it out, say hi in the comments, and enjoy the show! It's going to be a great month.

It’s not really a contest. We’re not even sure it’s a “tournament.” What the ToB has been and will be, as long as we’re putting it on, is a month-long conversation about novels and reading and writing and art that takes place on weekdays in March.